Media

[danalwyn]

Because squirrelly42 mentioned it, I'm unleashing some thoughts of mine on the nature, and possibly the future, of the news in the information age.



For those days in which my purpose in work is to waste federal tax dollars (consider you're getting me at a bonus rate before you complain), I usually surf through the news.

This is a long and elaborate process for me because a) I read fast, and b) I'm far more obsessive than your average Tom, Dick, and Harry.

So for news, I usually go through the spectrum. A typical path, over the course of a day, looks something like this:

Go through the big news sites:
BBC
CNN
MSNBC
ABC
etc.

Go through the newspapers I know:
New York Times
Los Angeles Times
Guardian
San Diego Union Tribune

Go through some international stuff:
Japan Times or Japan Today
Korea Herald
All Africa
etc.

Read the latest news on developing and continuing conflicts:
IRIN
Global Security
Foreign Policy
The Economist

And then it's on to the specialty news sites to see what's up for the day. I must say though that recently I've been somewhat disappointed.

I have a reasonable respect for Journalism, for which I blame my grandfather, a Journalism Professor for twenty-five years of his life, and the owner of a newspaper for several more years. But it seems to me that, even as the age of the internet brings us unparalleled access to the world, gives us information at the click of a button, and can deliver to our doorsteps reports from Al-Jazeera before they get to the streets of Saudi Arabia, that the quality of news has gone downhill of late.

Despite all those hundreds of articles, what I've found missing lately is good analysis, the sort of thing that should be powering the entire industry, and what we really pay journalists to tell us about. These days we can receive the news from halfway around the world in an instant, in all its gory details. I know, for instance, how many Ethiopian troops have died in the line of duty (by accident thankfully) on the Ethiopia and Eritrean border, and have a rough count on how many units are moving into the area. I know, approximately, what the financial situation of the new semi-autonomous region of southern Sudan is like. I am aware that the Maoists in Nepal have extended the cease-fire. But what I'm missing is the analysis.

How likely are we to see another war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and what are the opening moves we're looking at? I have to extrapolate from a few press releases that are probably less than two hundred words a piece, and that give no details. Someone, somewhere knows the details, and is currently summarizing them up for the State Department or for another set of officials. Why can't someone write articles on that for general consumption? How likely is the Nepalese cease-fire to hold, and how likely are the Maoists to hold to their offer to get involved in the political process? I don't have enough facts to even attempts at making am educated guess, but no news outlet will cover any second-page story in such depth. As the consumer, I am left grasping at straws.

We're now becoming accustomed to being able to access news immediately and on demand, but it seems to raise more questions than it answers. As information becomes increasingly easy to obtain, articles become more compressed, aiming to expectorate the greatest concentration of facts and soundbites onto our computer screen. Analysis has long been the purview of news magazines, but that coverage is splotchy; a few hot spots in a week. The don't cover nearly the volume that would keep us informed in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

It's rare to hear an educated American who doesn't grumble about the sorry state of the news, filled with junk, celebrity interest stories, and thirty-second sound bites. This is a huge market that nobody has yet managed to tap, simply because there has not yet been an organization willing to provide a news coverage that is much more than this. It's possible that the first organization to provide meaningful and in-depth analysis of foreign and local events, on demand, will receive a great many subscribers.

I think the future of the media is going to end up two-tiered, the people who put together the sound bites on one side, who will continue to make things shorter and more terse. On the other end of the spectrum will be those who provide more analysis, more depth, and more content. Their articles will end up being served to users through huge news sites, relayed on demand directly to people's desktops, without the usual costs of paper distribution. The on-demand model has been too successful to ignore and it's probably the future. And there are a lot of people who find themselves interested in a lot of different, very small portions of the world. I'm sure you could drive some kind of market with ex-patriates alone, and it would help people keep in touch, and feel like they knew their part of the world. It's well worth the cost.

Sooner or later somebody will do it. The information exists out there, the experts are available, and the demand is here. It will have to start small, of course, without the flashy graphics or anything else, but it has the potential to grow out of the Blogging industry into something a lot better organized, more formal, and more reliable. And actual knowledge of underlying causes and events will greatly strengthen democracy in many countries, not to mention distributing widely a lot of the information known only to a few today. It seems that a network, no matter how underground it is, of well-developed news sites, will emerge sooner or later to deal with the continual collapse of the major ones. And the sooner it happens, the better.

In the meantime, I'll settle for hearing good guesses about whether Eritrea is going to try and invade Ethiopia.

Comments

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

You could still talk to my grandfather, but he's old enough that his mind just doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm afraid you wouldn't get much of his attention.

The paper media seems to be a dwindling establishment. Gone are the days when getting one newspaper was expected, and getting two or three was the mark of a well-informed man. The current system allows information to travel too fast without ever having touched pen to paper.

It just seems to me that the problem is that we have too many beat reporters running around, eagerly gathering facts, and too few people sitting up at the top and trying to put facts together. This is one thing the internet can do better than the print media. There is essentially no size limit on the internet, and a large news service can take up megabytes with giant essay-like analysis of every subject that takes their fancy. They don't have to worry about cramming things into a single column format.

In the short term though, the newspapers are going to take some hits. Whether they somehow manage to figure out a way to distribute in-depth local articles remains to be seen.

[john-yik.livejournal.com]

The problem with bloggers doing the analysis, however, is that, even more than they bash conventional media, there can be incredible bias built in to all but the best bloggers out there. Most of them are going to tend to interpret events to present their particular cause or bugbear in the best possible light, or ignore news that doesn't agree with them.

This can actually make the situation worse, actually--much more chaff to sift through. If the situation that danalwyn's describing with the blogosphere is to come to pass, the first thing needed is going to be a good, reliable filtering mechanism.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Sifting through blogs is such an arduous task that I've given up for the most part. It does take a lot of time for a blogger to build up an audience that trusts him, and they change far more often than a newspaper does.

At least when I get the New York Times Op-Ed page, I know exactly what I'm getting and what kind of people I'm getting it from.

[john-yik.livejournal.com]

Even more than they bash conventional media for was what I intended to say. I need sleep.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Mostly because it's much easier, and more reliable, for an editor to do this, because an editor has access to the field. It's very difficult for me, doing analysis at home, to pick up a phone and tell someone to find out where a particular Chechnyan political figure is at this very moment. Part of the problem with analysis is that it's usually not until you get to that stage that you realize what you really need to know. It may not be as easy to see from the ground which big pieces of the picture are missing, so it has to be guided not only from the reporter's nose, but also from some sort of central authority.

Ideally this isn't needed, and you have accredited journalists following every person of importance on the planet. Without that widespread level of coverage, we do need some feedback, and the reporter->editor->distributor->blogger chain just seems too long and unwieldy to me.